Preceded by short: The Night of the Owl (France, François Dupeyron, 12 mins, 35mm), a frame-by-frame meditation on flowers shot over a period of seven years. This movie involves several encounters. First, a talented young director with a magnificently written screenplay encountered two great stars of French cinema, Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu. They not only risked working with this unknown filmmaker, but gambled on coproducing the film. The movie itself is about an encounter, a short and simple one: it's a love story, the story of a man and woman meeting. Where? In the parking lot of a rest stop, along a superhighway, at night. The entire film takes place there. France has been abandoned by her husband after an argument. Charles is a surgeon who's decided to be by himself for a while, to stop and think things over. The challenge for François Dupeyron is how to tell this story, a strange yet familiar one, because it reaches us in the secret place where our souls are fragile. Deneuve is superb. Long after the screening we're still caught up in the spell of her extremely moving performance. It's the first time she's gone so far. Depardieu, meanwhile, is surprisingly touching, always there for her. This whole film is a remarkably written piece of music: the text (by Dupeyron and his wife Dominique Faysse), the characters, the actors, the direction. Movies like François Dupeyron's allow us to continue to believe in cinema. Marie-Pierre Macia